San Onofre Mitigation Plan Wins Approval : Energy: Environmentalists criticize Coastal Commission’s failure to order a full halt to the nuclear plant’s destruction of fish and kelp.

After 17 years of debate over the environmental impact of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, the California Coastal Commission adopted a plan Tuesday that commissioners acknowledged will mitigate, but not prevent, the plant’s ongoing destruction of tons of fish and kelp.

Working with data from a 15-year, $46-million study designed to look at the long-term impact of the plant, the commission voted 7 to 2 to require the plant’s operator, Southern California Edison, to improve the plant’s fish protection systems, build a 300-acre artificial reef nearby and restore a 150-acre coastal wetland somewhere in Southern California.

“What we have crafted here is as specific and detailed an approach as we have ever recommended,” Peter M. Douglas, the commission’s executive director, said. “We do believe it is going to lead to a restored, functioning wetland and that remediation will occur.”

Edison officials, who held a news conference last week to voice their support for the plan, were delighted by the vote.

“This is a good result for the people of California,” said Michael Hertel, Edison’s manager of environmental affairs, who estimated that the plan will cost Edison $30 million to implement. “We are pleased. We’re on the track now of doing something positive about the problem--productive work, not just writing checks (to pay) for research.”

But environmental advocates, several of whom had addressed the commission during five hours of testimony Tuesday, were visibly disappointed. Instead of ending debate about the nuclear plant’s role, they predicted, the commission’s vote will spark controversy.

“It’s essentially buying another lawsuit, this one against the Coastal Commission,” said Steve Crandall, a lawyer representing the Earth Island Institute, which filed suit last November against Edison because of its alleged violations of federal pollutant-discharge permits at San Onofre, just south of the Orange County line.

Crandall described the plan approved Tuesday as “guessing, maybes and what-ifs,” saying the commission was using unproven remedies to fix “terrible” degradation.

Rimmon C. Fay, one of three biologists on the commission’s Marine Review Committee, which conducted the 15-year study, agreed, calling the Coastal Commission’s vote a failure.

“The evidence was there. They ducked the issue and went to the cosmetic solution of wetlands, which are popular,” said Fay, who represented environmental interests on the panel. The commission’s plan, he said, will mean “the resident fishes can look forward to being sucked in and killed. What’s the balance? I fail to understand it.”

The two commissioners who voted against the plan seemed concerned about the unproven nature of the mitigation measures. One suggested adding penalties if the measures do not work.

Released in September, 1989, the committee’s study found that the nuclear plant had caused a 60%, or 200-acre, reduction in the area covered by the San Onofre kelp bed. The study said the plant’s cooling system sucks up and kills 21 to 57 tons of fish and 4 billion eggs and larvae yearly, then discharges the debris-filled water into the ocean, reducing natural light on the ocean floor by as much as 16%.

Fay and Crandall were among many who advocated retrofitting the nuclear plant’s existing cooling apparatus with cooling towers, which use less sea water.

But on Tuesday, a commission staff scientist testified that the towers themselves had negative side effects--among them, a substantial “salt fallout” when mist from the towers deposits salt on the surrounding land, as well as the aesthetically unpleasant addition of 300-foot concrete cones on the coastline.

Commissioner David Malcolm, who voted for the plan, said that the $1-billion to $2-billion cost of the proposed cooling towers would hurt Edison’s customers more than the utility itself.

“I feel that the gun is not being (pointed) at Edison, the bad guy, but at me, the ratepayer, the good guy,” he said. “The last thing I need to do is have my utility bill doubled because we’ve built ugly cooling towers. . . . To me, they’re out of the question.”